“We just do our best,” I say.
“Did you never know my husband?”
I put my hands on my doorframe and look consolingly at poor fast-departing Myrlene, soon to join her beloved in the other place. “I sure did,” I say.
“Now he was a wonderful man,” Mrs. Beavers says, taking the words from my very thought. She shakes her head at his lost visage.
“We all miss him,” I say.
“I guess we do,” she says, and starts her halting, painful way back inside her house. “I guess we sho ’nuf do.”
5
I drive windingly out Montmorency Road into Haddam horse country — our little Lexington — where fences are long, white and orthogonal, pastures wide and sloping, and roads (Rickett’s Creek Close, Drumming Log Way, Peacock Glen) slip across shaded, rocky rills via wooden bridges and through the quaking aspens back to rich men’s domiciles snugged deep in summer foliage. Here, the Fish & Game quietly releases hatchery trout each spring so well-furnished sportsmen/home owners with gear from Hardy’s can hike down and wet a line; and here, wedges of old-growth hardwoods still loom, trees that saw Revolutionary armies rumble past, heard the bugles, shouts and defiance cries of earlier Americans in their freedom swivet, and beneath which now tawny-haired heiresses in jodhpurs stroll to the paddock with a mind for a noon ride alone. Occasionally I’ve shown houses out this way, though their owners, fat and bedizened as pharaohs, and who should be giddy with the world’s gifts, always seem the least pleasant people in the world and the most likely to treat you like part-time yard help when you show up to “present their marvelous home.” Mostly, Shax Murphy handles these properties for our office, since by nature he possesses the right brand of inbred cynicism to find it all hilarious, and likes nothing more than peeling the skin off rich clients a centimeter at a time. I, on the other hand, cleave to the homier market, whose homespun spirit I prize.
I think now, with regard to the disagreeable McLeods, that my mistake has been pretty plain: I should’ve hauled them over for a cookout the minute I closed on their house, gotten them into some lawn chairs on the deck, slammed a double margarita in both of them, served up a rack of ranch-style ribs, corn on the cob, tomato and onion salad and a key lime pie, and all after would’ve been jake. Later, when matters took a sour turn (as always happens between landlord and tenant, unless the tenants are inclined toward gratitude, or the landlord’s a fool), we’d have had some instant history for ballast against suspicion and ill will, which are now unhappily the status quo. Why I didn’t I don’t know, except that it’s not my nature.
I literally bashed right into Franks one summer night a year ago, driving home tired and foggy-eyed from the Red Man Club, where I’d fished till ten. In its then incarnation as Bemish’s Birch Beer Depot, it rose appealingly up out of the night as I rounded a curve on Route 31, my eyes smarting and heavy, my mouth dry as burlap, the perfect precondition for a root beer.
Everybody over forty (unless they were born in the Bronx) has pristine and uncomplicated memories of such places: low, orange-painted wooden bunker boxes with sliding-screen customers’ windows, strings of yellow bulbs outside, whitewashed tree trunks and trash barrels, white car tires designating proper parking etiquette, plenty of instructional signs on the trees and big frozen mugs of too-cold root beer you could enjoy on picnic tables by a brook or else drink off metal trays with your squeeze in the dark, radio-lit sanctity of your ’57 Ford.
As soon as I saw this one I angled straight toward the lot, though at the precise moment I turned I apparently dozed off and drove right across the white-tire barrier, over a petunia bed, and gave one of the green picnic tables a board-cracking whack, which brought the owner, Karl Bemish, booming out the side door in his paper cap and his apron, wanting to know what in the hell I featured myself doing, and pretty sure I was drunk and in need of being arrested.
None of it came to anything unhappy (far from it). I was naturally enough awakened by the crash, climbed out apologizing at a high rate of speed, offered to take a breathalyzer, peeled off three hundred bucks to cover all damages and explained I’d been fishing, not closing down some gin mill in Frenchtown, and had veered into the lot because I thought the place was so goddamned irresistible out here by the brook with strings of bulbs and white trees, and in fact still wanted a root beer if he could see his way clear to selling me one.
Karl let himself be talked out of being mad by stuffing my wad of money in his apron pocket and relying on good character to concede that sometimes innocent things happen and sometimes (if rarely) the stated cause of an event is the real cause.
With my root beer in hand, I took a table that wasn’t cracked and sat smilingly beside babbling Trendle Brook, my thoughts on my father stopping with me in just such places in the long-ago Fifties, in the far-away South, when as a Navy purchasing officer he had taken me on trips so my mother could recover from the chaos of being home alone with me night and day.
After a while Karl Bemish came out, having switched off all but one string of bulbs. He was carrying another root beer for me and a real suds for himself, and sat down across the table, happy to have a late-night chit-chat with a stranger who in spite of some initial suspiciousness seemed to be a good person to end the day with by virtue of being the only one around.
Karl, of course, did all the talking. (There were apparently insufficient opportunities to talk to his customers through the sliding window.) He was a widower, he said, and had been employed in the ergonomics field up in Tarrytown for almost thirty years. His wife, Millie, had died three years before, and he’d just decided to take his retirement, cash in his company stock and go looking for something imaginative to do (this sounded familiar). He knew plenty about ergonomics, a science I’d never even heard of, but nothing about retail trade or the food service industry or dealing with the public. And he admitted he’d bought the birch beer stand totally on a whim, after seeing it advertised in an entrepreneurs magazine. Where he had grown up, in the little upstate Polish community of Pulaski, New York, there’d been a place just like his right by a little stream that ran into Lake Ontario, and it of course was the “real meeting place” for all the kids and the grownups too. He’d met his wife there and even remembered working in the place and wearing a brown cotton smock with his name stitched in darker brown script on the front and a brown paper cap, though he admitted he could never find any actual evidence he’d worked there and had probably just dreamed it up as a way better to furnish his past. He remembered that place and time, though, as the best of his life, and his own birch beer stand served, he felt, to commemorate it.
“Of course, things haven’t worked out exactly perfect here now,” Karl said, taking his white paper cap off and setting it on the sticky planks of the picnic table, revealing his smooth, lacquered-looking dome, shiny under the string of lights strung back to the Depot. He was sixty-five and a big sausage-handed, small-eared guy who looked more like he might’ve loaded bricks for a living.
“It sure seems awful good to me,” I said, taking an admiring look around. Everything was newly painted, washed, picked up, as GI’d as a hospital grounds. “I’d think you pretty much had a gold mine out here.” I nodded approvingly, full to the gills with rich and creamy root beer.
“Super my first year and a half. I did super,” Karl Bemish said. “The previous guy had let the place run down. And I put some money in it and fixed everything up. People in the little communities out here said it was great to see an old place restored and wanted to see it catch on again, and people like you stopped by late. It became a meeting place again, or started to. And I guess I got overexcited, ’cause I added a machine to make these slush puppies. I had some cash flow. Then I bought a yogurt machine. Then I bought a trailer kitchen to cater parties with. Then I got this idea from the entrepreneurs magazine to buy an old railroad dining car to fix up as a restaurant and put it beside here; maybe have a waiter out there, a limited menu, rig it up with chrome fixtures, original tables, bud vases, carpets. For special occasions.” Karl looked over his shoulder in the direction of the brook and frowned. “It’s all back there. I bought the goddamn thing from a place in Lackawanna and had it trucked down here in two pieces and set up right on a length of track. That’s about when I ran out of money.” Karl shook his head and brushed at a mosquito camped out on his pate.